Creativity Prompts for Writers, Journalers, Artists and Speakers

Prompt #72: Bubbling Up into Awareness

You really have to click through to see this picture on Flickr at full size. It is such a great image of our subconscious. There are things we’ve left behind strewn along the road, things we’ve never noticed, and things we are purposefully ignoring. Our brains are pretty messy places.

Something was bothering me. It happened that way, sometimes. It’s like a little pebble that gets in your shoe and, after a while, you feel like you’re carrying around a boulder. My mind worked like that—something inconspicuous escaped my attention at first, but then, after a while, the significance hit me like a brick, as if parts of my brain had been silently mulling it over and suddenly reached a conclusion. -Kyle Kirkland, One Out of Many, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, July 1, 2011

Writing Prompt: Write a list of at least 10 things that are in your protagonist’s subconscious, irritating and working to bubble up into awareness.

Journaling Prompt: Write about something that you carried around in your subconscious until it got as big as a boulder.

Art Prompt: Subsconscious

Nonfiction / Speechwriting Prompt: Tell a humorous story about something in your subconscious that led you to do something crazy/silly/foolish.